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At the Miami Circle site on Brickell Point, where the Miami River meets Biscayne Bay, Tequesta Indians used shell tools to carve a 38-foot-wide circle into the soft limestone -- the 125,000-year-old fossilized remains of ancient corals and other marine organisms that underlie Miami.
The discovery of this mysterious relic near the dawn of a new century sparked awe and wonder, and a collective passion so great, the Circle and its surrounding two acres of land, which was once a part of a larger Tequesta village, were saved from development.
Miami’s Stonehenge, some called it. A sacred site, others maintain, imbued with mystical power.
Today this National Historic Landmark is mostly scruffy grass and a thumbnail waterfront park favored by dog walkers in the shadow of Brickell high-rises.
That could change soon. The State of Florida, which owns the land, has announced plans to revive interest in the ancestral origins of the site. This has come after local officials, government agencies, and activists (with candlelight vigils and prayers) who helped save the site back in 2000 complained about its poor conditions. New interpretive signs and spruced-up landscaping could be installed before long.
But those park-like improvements are the superficial niceties suitable for every city park.
The Miami Circle is something else.
“The meaning of Circle: an ancient and universal symbol of unity, wholeness, and infinity” reads one interpretive sign on the site. “An object of nature, an idealization of pure mathematics, and symbol or framework we use to understand and describe the world.”
But what is the true meaning of the Miami Circle? And what can an extinct tribe teach us about our future?
The answer may lie in the very stone the Tequestas left etched and pocked beneath our feet, filled with sacrificial emblems and aligned to the Earth’s axis.
Resilience. Adaptation. Sustainability. These are the buzz words of climate-change forums. But for the Tequestas, who lived off the rich marine environment of rivers, estuaries, and what we today call Biscayne Bay, these words would encompass the language of survival. And the stone beneath their feet was the bedrock of their civilization.
There is no doubt that what lies beneath is our legacy. But as Miami contemplates an uncertain future in the face of climate change and sea level rise, what lies beneath may also foretell our destiny.
In Miami-Dade, our bedrock is the limestone that created the Atlantic Coastal Ridge, where all development started.
This is the limestone that gave rise to the pinelands from which pioneers culled the wood for homes, the same rock that built the roads, and kept us high and dry when floodwaters rose.
Until now this bedrock has served us well. Over the past century, development has encroached further into the green of the Everglades like a python consuming every living thing it encounters.
But from now on, the limestone that gave rise to the Atlantic Ridge will betray us. When the floodwaters rise from the sea, they will also seep upward through that same porous rock beneath our feet.
A new study in Nature Climate Change predicts that no matter what we do now to reduce carbon emissions, a certain amount of sea level rise is assured, leading to a 1.8-meter rise by 2100. Under this worst-case scenario for Miami, two million people could be displaced.
On a recent dry, sunny afternoon, a dog walker and a few tourists were at the Miami Circle. None of them realized they were at the site of a 2000-year-old archaeological site, the very cradle of Miami civilization.
“Is it here?” asked a woman, her eyes darting across the landscape of dried grass and limestone rocks that hid the Miami Circle.
The air smelled faintly of dog excrement and marine life, the Miami River lapping against the seawall. Across the narrow dark river, mega yachts were anchored. On the Brickell Bridge, the iconic statue of a Tequesta warrior stood, his arms outstretched toward the blue sky, now obscured by the concrete and glass of a new downtown real estate boom.
Perhaps we have forgotten about the Miami Circle because we buried it. Perhaps we have forgotten because we are a city that redefines itself every few years, and waves of newcomers roll in with every tide, like seaweed, with no memory of what the Miami Circle meant to the community when it was discovered in the summer of 1998.
We have lost touch with what it means to contemplate a connection to 2000 years past, when the hands of an ancient people carved the very bedrock that would build a city in the 20th Century.
But because we saved this place where the river meets the bay, we can still imagine what it was like to live under an open blue sky, close to the sea, at a time when it seemed the world had no end.
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